The rise of Farage and Reform UK

Reform UK in figures

The number of paying subscribers exceeds 235,000 (paying £25 per year), surpassing that of the Conservatives and four times more than in July 2024.

Reform UK came third in the 2024 general elections with just over 14% of the vote (4.1 million). It has four MPs (previously six, but two have left after fall outs with Farage).

In this year’s local elections, it won control of ten city councils, two regional mayors, and now has about 870 local councillors.

It is setting up over400 local branches following its success in the 2025 local elections. This is important for the stabilisation of the party. Councillors help build local branches.

Reform UK has been leading the polls since January this year. The latest polls give Nigel Farage’s party as high as 35% (Independent newspaper) close to the percentage of votes obtained by the Labour Party in last year’s general election. Today, Starmer’s Labour government languishes at 18% to 20%.

It continues to win local council by-elections, taking seats from Labour. It is also winning where it has no local base.

It is trying to involve more women and attract young people where it has less support: Almost two-thirds (61%) of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 said they would never vote for Reform, but the problem remains that young people vote much less than older people. No doubt it will borrow the tactic of recently assassinated Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organisation in the USA to win more young people here.

Reform’s political vision

Reform, particularly in the shape of Farage, argues that Britain is in disarray, in decline, crime is on the rise, there is a cost-of-living crisis and a general collapse of values, morality, and the family.

It claims one of the main causes of the decline is immigration and the inability of our political elite to address it and defend ‘our people’ from the apparent assault of immigrants on the stability and shared values of our society.

The political elite is incapable of addressing these issues, it says, because it does not break with the woke/green/progressive culture and has failed to deliver a true Brexit. Farage accuses high-level state officials of holding the same ideology blocking the change Reform wants.

Farage’s ‘solution’ is forced mass deportations, tax cuts but support for certain national industries, cuts in social spending but opposition to certain government cuts, e.g., heating allowances for pensioners.

Like much of the US right they not only support the traditional family but increasingly promote a natalist agenda. So their opposition to the two child cap goes hand in hand with misogynist rhetoric and policies.

Reform is a party that denies the impact of climate change and is opposed to official carbon targets. It supports the fossil fuel companies.

They use increasing dissatisfaction with the current failures of our hollowed out NHS, devastated by contracting out, overworked and underpaid staff and decades of underfunding to push for a shift to an insurance-based healthcare system instead of our free service. However, they don’t prioritise this because despite the problems the NHS remains popular.

These ideas also appeal increasingly to traditional and right wing Christians, particularly the Evangelicals. One of the factors behind the 100,000 on the 13th September demonstration led by Tommy Robinson was the presence of right wing Evangelical groups.

Behind the ideology

These policies are similar to the arguments of Meloni/Salvini/Le Pen/Trump/Orban. There are elements of the great replacement theory – that migrants, particularly muslims, are going to replace indigenous Europeans. The inaccurate racist claim that migrants are more likely to commit crime is used by all these leaders. The right wing vision feeds on people’s pessimism about society and politics caused by Labour’s failure to improve the lives of workers.

This ideology is not just a question of ideas transmitted in speeches by Farage and others but is based on everyday social relations and practice which is dominated much more on gross inequality and a material crisis; just visit some small towns in the North.

The previous commonsense ideology that your children would do better than you or if you studied you could get a good job and afford a house is much less operative today compared with the period up to the 1980s. Even the gains through house ownership under Thatcher that a significant minority of working people enjoyed or the globalisation boom of the Blair years – is over.

Reform provides the myth of a new active ideology that is largely backward looking but provides a comfort blanket against the insecurity and threats of the ‘other’ (migrants or the EU). The left cannot respond to this by just saying (like Labour) if we can get growth and some material improvements in workers’ lives then we can defeat Reform, We need a solid credible left afternative.

Overlap with the fascist right

The real fascists are three or more groups with hundreds rather than thousands of members: Patriotic Alternative, Homeland Party, Britain First. Tommy Robinson is the best known and has good connections with the US far right. He used to run the English Defence League that no longer exists. He has good contacts with racist football fans – he calls them the football lads. On some occasions, he has mobilized more than 10,000 people. Today he achieved his biggest successful with over 100,000 on the streets of London. It was boosted by the success of fascist groups over the asylum hotels, the disarray of the Labour government and the recent assassination of his US co-thinker Charlie Kirk.

Lucy Connolly who called for the burning down of refugee hotels was a big focus for the demo as a supposed free speech martyr of the right. His YouTube video preparing the demo emphasised non violence and not drinking too much. These groups all work largely through social media. They are not particularly into organised militia, physical exercise or uniforms.

They organized protests against hotels for asylum seekers, but Reform and now the Conservative Party have also supported them. Even some official Labour spokespeople have said they understand the feelings of the local population.

Farage is careful to keep his distance from Tommy Robinson and other fascist groups, but we have noticed overlap in these mobilizations. Farage verbally condemns violence. Many fascists have joined Reform; in fact, the leader of Patriotic Alternative has encouraged his militants to join Reform and has also called on them to vote for Reform.

Many Reform members (28%) support a figure such as Robinson. After today this figure is probably an underestimate. Although Reform’s leadership has removed candidates from the fascist right, it has not identified some members who have made racist, anti-gay, and Islamophobic statements.

The rise of Reform has emboldened true fascists and given them a wider audience. The success in getting asylum hotels closed has also helped them. Additionally, they are organising a campaign putting union jacks and English flags up on lampposts and elsewhere. Robert Jenrick has joined (there is a photo of him on a lamppost!). It has had an impact. There are reports of gangs harassing Black and Asian people, asking for proof they are not illegal.

Fascism as a current today is part of a wider hard right populist movement. You could talk of a dialectical relationship within the broader process of creeping fascism. The right wing and even the whole of mainstream conservative parties can be sucked into this too. Social media today with its seamlessness/lack of frontiers facilitates this amalgam of different right wing currents.

Link with Trump

The idea that his party has the attention of the most powerful regime in the world gives him a certain credibility, but Farage has had to manage this relationship as Trump is not very popular here. For example, tariff policy is not a winning issue. So he manages this link.

He took Lucy Connolly to the US who tweeted a call to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers. She was just released early after a 30-month sentence for inciting racial hatred and violence. She has called herself a political prisoner of Starmer, and Farage presents her as a champion of free speech.

Reform hopes to receive financial support from the US right wing. Even though its membership growth and increased support from wealthy business people already gives it a good war chest. The US right wing has huge resources and expertise on social media (Charlie Kirk) that they can lend Farage.

Who is Nigel Farage?

Unlike Meloni or Le Pen, there is no direct link to a fascist political movement although he was briefly close to the BNP as a youth. Farage makes frequent reference to the period of British victory over the Nazis in World War II. There is no link to the historical British fascists of Oswald Mosley and his brown shirts.

His ideology is linked to English nationalism and anti-Europeanism. He emerged from the right wing of the Conservative Party in opposition to its support for the Maastricht Treaty.

Farage presents himself as a man of the people, who smokes and loves beer, but in fact he is the son of a billionaire and has worked in the City of London in the financial sector. He is wealthy, with five houses and lucrative television contracts.

Reform is a private company owned by Nigel Farage. Now, with the growth of Reform, he says he is introducing a democratic structure into the party’s functioning. He has set up some sort of broader panel as a consultative leadership. The purpose is limited, and the party remains in the hands of Farage and his inner circle.

Shrewd

Like Trump and Berlusconi, he has been underestimated by the left and many others.

His first anti-European party won less than 5% of the vote. He then used the European Parliament as a platform to sow discord, relentlessly attacking corrupt establishment politicians.

He won the right to a referendum on leaving Europe because he did so well in the 2014 European elections. The then Conservative Prime Minister Cameron thought he could only stop him by inducing a referendum and then defeating him.

His separate Leave campaign contributed to mobilising for the narrow Yes vote to leave the EU. His racist use of an anti-migrant poster was effective. Public opinion and the commentariat accepted that it was his victory as much Boris Johnson’s.

After Brexit, he helped Boris Johnson rise to power in 2019 through a de facto electoral alliance. He then found himself in a favourable position to take advantage of the Conservatives’ disarray after their massive defeat in 2024. Like Meloni, he built his support through unity and competition with traditional right-wing parties.

Today, he is winning over more and more elected representatives and staff members of the Conservatives. He has the option of continuing to attack them, but also of striking a deal before or after the 2029 general election.

Winning the narrative

Pundits in papers like the Independent have pointed out how Farage has dominated the political world this August. It is not such a surprise that Labour did not respond effectively given that it shares much of Reform’s general narrative of the migrant ‘problem’. Farage is pushing both the Conservatives and Labour further to the right on immigration.

Robert Jenrick, the challenger to the current Conservative leader, has encouraged protests outside hotels. He has participated alongside well-known fascists. He has made racist statements. He says he fears for his daughters walking the streets in areas where there are hotels for asylum seekers…

Labour is releasing daily statements on social media and to the press saying it is tough on migrants. Its latest response to the hotel crisis is to try to shorten the refugee appeal process and remove judges from the panels that decide. It clearly wants to reduce the 75% of so-called illegal migrants arriving in small boats who currently obtain asylum. Some right-wing Labour MPs are pushing to mirror Reform’s policies even more closely.

Prospects for a government led by Farage or a Farage/Conservative alliance

Both scenarios are possible, given the undemocratic First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system. Although coalition is more likely

It’s true, we are 3 or 4 years away from the general election. In the past, political experts would have said that these were just opinion polls. People are protesting now, but when the election comes, they will want to vote for a credible government. In any case we shall see evidence of the Reform surge in the local, Sennedd and Scottish parliament elections next May

But the same commentators (e.g. John Curtice) now recognize that there is a deep crisis in the traditional parties and greater instability, which was already seen in the last election. They say we are already in a 4 or 5-party system rather than a two-party system.

With FPTP, extraordinary results can be achieved. For example, Labour has a majority of 174 seats with only 33% of the popular vote. If Labour’s vote collapses, similar shocks could occur. Small parties could even hold the balance of power.

Current talk of challenging Starmer’s position inside Labour is linked to the threat posed by Farage’s continued rise in the polls. Even newly elected Starmerite MPs fear losing their seats.

How to stop Farage, Reform and the fascists

The revolutionary left has organized a reaction in the streets to defend asylum seekers in hotels. In some places we have brought out many more than the racists, in others they have been more numerous. It is a long way from an overwhelmingly mass suffocation of the fascists. Today’s counter demonstration was about twenty times smaller than the Tommy Robinson one.

But we need a political response: not all Reform supporters are Nazis. Yelling “Nazi scum” at some local residents who oppose refugee hotels is not particularly effective. We need local door to door and leafleting in the neighbourhoods. D K Renton, a left activist, made some good points about this debate in his article in the Guardian.

This is where Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left-wing party can play an important role. Opinion polls show that Reform voters prefer Corbyn to Starmer. Corbyn scores well on a range of parameters such as honesty or the ability to understand ordinary people

800,000 people have expressed interest online. Hundreds of meetings have already been organized to discuss the creation of local branches. It is essential that there is not only an electoral response to the far right, but that the new party becomes a useful tool for defending migrants, self-organization, and the struggle of the working class.

The new left-wing party can play an important role in stopping the rise of Reform.

Some polls show that Reform voters can combine anti-migrant attitudes with some pro-worker policies, such as new labor laws.

In conclusion, there is a race between radicalization on the left and radicalization on the right. With the new left-wing party, we can play an important role in repelling the far right.

Michael Rosen has written a poem that reflects some of the points in this article

I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…

It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

Dave Kellaway is on the Editorial Board of Anti*Capitalist Resistance, a member of Hackney and Stoke Newington Labour Party, a contributor to International Viewpoint and Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres.

The rise of Farage and Reform UK